Weekly Blog Club

When we started blogging back in October, I felt a bit of pressure to make sure that our blog was a success. It was my suggestion that blogging could meet some gaps in our information service (which you can read more about here).

The things that worried me included that:

nobody would read it

the blogging voice that I’d developed when I’d started my own blog would not transfer well to the Participation Cymru blog

I would be seen as an “expert” in participation, when what I wanted to do was share things I was learning, rather than being authoritative (we work in the field of participation – best practice what we preach!)

One of the things that helped assuage some of my fears has been the Weekly Blog Club, to which we’ve been contributing posts since November. It was founded by a group of people who work in or with the public sector, voluntary groups or communities in the UK in order to encourage blogging.

Contributing bloggers come from a range of backgrounds and organisations from different parts of the UK, which makes for a brilliant mix. Reading these blogs encouraged me and made me realise that a range of voices are effective in different ways, and that if they can talk about their work in an informal voice, then so can I.

Having been contributing for a few months, it felt right that I took the bold leap into running it for a week, which I did last week. This gave me a chance to replenish my karma that I’d used up by getting the club to share my work when I felt like I hadn’t done enough to help out the club myself.

Running the club for a week was a great experience – I read a wide array of blogs in depth, and thought about how we might use our blog more creatively, as submissions ranged from fantastic photos and interesting postcards, to thought-provoking Spotify playlists (here and here).

10 thoughts on “Weekly Blog Club”

Thanks very much, Dyfrig, for looking after Weekly Blog Club last week, innovating the form of summary, and writing a post about the experience. It’s useful for me to know what people gain from being active participants – and I am very glad that being a member has helped you in part of your work.

Really sorry about that, I’ve gone through the list of blogs for the week I covered (10-17 February) and I couldn’t see your submission. Would you mind sending me a link and I’ll be happy to update it?